Stock Market Today: Stocks turn lower with inflation data in focus; Bitcoin tops $72,000
Wall Street shifts focus to inflation data later this week following a solid February jobs report.
Check back for updates throughout the trading day
U.S. equity futures turned lower Monday, while the dollar slipped against its global peers, as investors looked to a key inflation reading tomorrow following a dovish February jobs report last week.
Updated at 8:17 EDT
More Bitcoin records
Bitcoin prices hit another record high Monday, and were last marked 4% higher at $71,712.80 each after topping $72,000 for the first time ever earlier in the session.
Some of today's price gains could be linked to a move by MicroStrategy to buy around 12,000 bitcoin at a cost of $821.7 million
MicroStrategy has acquired an additional 12,000 BTC for ~$821.7M using proceeds from convertible notes & excess cash for ~$68,477 per #bitcoin. As of 3/10/24, $MSTR hodls 205,000 $BTC acquired for ~$6.91B at average price of $33,706 per bitcoin. https://t.co/YayyKtpz8d— Michael Saylor⚡️ (@saylor) March 11, 2024
Stock Market Today
Stocks ended lower on Friday, led by a sharp decline in tech stocks amid a big intraday move from AI chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA) , despite a February jobs report that suggested solid hiring gains against fading wage growth.
The overall reading, seen as an indicator of the potential for a soft landing in the economy later this year, stoked bets on an early-spring interest-rate cut from the Federal Reserve and lower Treasury bond yields but failed to support stocks into the close of the session.
The market's macro focus is likely to shift this week to Tuesday's inflation report for February, which is expected to show a further slowdown in the closely tracked core reading while indicating little change at the headline level from the 3.1% pace recorded over January.
Benchmark 10-year Treasury note yields eased modestly into the start of the New York session, with eyes on both Tuesday's inflation data and a $39 billion auction of new paper set for 1 pm Eastern Time that same day.
The U.S. dollar index, meanwhile, was marked 0.03% lower against a basket of its global peers at 102.679, the lowest since mid-January.
Wall Street will navigate only a handful of earnings this week as the S&P 500 earnings season draws to a close. Updates are expected from database-management giant Oracle (ORCL) after the closing bell and retailer Kohl's (KSS) , homebuilder Lennar (LEN) and graphics-software stalwart Adobe (ADBE) later in the week.
With 494 of the benchmark's 500 companies report so far, collective fourth-quarter earnings are estimated to rise 10% from a year earlier to $476.1 billion, according to LSEG data.
That growth rate is likely to slow sharply, however, to around 5.3% over the current quarter, drawing in share-weighted earnings of around $459.8 billion.
With this week's data on tap and a muted session of data ahead, stocks are set for a mixed open. Futures contracts tied to the S&P 500, which is up 7.47% for the year, are indicating an 18 point opening bell gain.
Futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, meanwhile, are priced for a 130 point decline while those linked to the tech-focused Nasdaq are indicating an 82 point dip.
In Europe, stocks moved lower in early Frankfurt trading, with the Stoxx 600 benchmark falling 0.44%, while Britain's FTSE 100 slipped 0.43% in London.
Overnight in Asia, data showing a better-than-expected revision for fourth-quarter GDP in Japan, which effectively indicated the country avoided technical recession, stoked bets on a Bank of Japan rate move. The report sent the Nikkei 225 2.19% lower to 38,820.49 points.
Asia's regionwide MSCI ex-Japan index, meanwhile, was marked 0.13% lower into the close of trading.
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